Cinema Purgatorio

And there was I. An AB Literature student who snuck out of class to drink with friends — nomads, vagabonds, call them what you will from the college of music. Two hours of drinking transformed us into a compendium of hair, guts, blood, Red Horse, gin and goat stew. Brains in there, somewhere, a-stewing. I went back to the classroom not the best or the most sober version of myself. Misguidedly.

My professor (O.A.D.) is the only person I respected in the royal and pontifical university at that time. When she talked about poetry, she glowed with holy fire. Blackbirds fluttered from poems by Wallace Stevens, hollow men trundled from the pages of T.S. Eliot. What she felt, she taught. Her words had the power of scripture. A few listened, even fewer learned.

And there she was, asking me how modern writers satirized the world around them. For example, if they think the world is meaningless how do they convey that in prose? I’d been reading William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury at that time, and was baffled by Benjy’s chapter — the nonlinearity, the swimming stream-of-consciousness, and oh the ferocity of nothingness. You see, Benjy is suffering from (I don’t know what you call it in today’s politically correct world) mental retardation. Faulkner made readers live in the seemingly illogical mind of the narrator. Joyce famously did that in Ulysses (I cloistered myself to finish it), before crafting the dream language of Finnegans Wake (maybe I will get around to reading it — when I grow two more brains).

In the same way, Samuel Beckett made you wait for Godot along with the two tramps. When the first full-theatrical performance of Waiting for Godot was staged in France in 1953 it got such a drubbing in the press.

When it was staged in Lüttringhausen Prison in Germany, the captive (well, literally) audience was awestruck. They knew that waiting for nothing (or for some ineffable thing that doesn’t arrive) is the human condition in the existential theater of the absurd. (The 2009 production of Waiting for Godot featured Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, who play Magneto and Charles Xavier in the X-Men movies. Absurdly appealing.)

Somehow Faulkner, Joyce and Beckett had something to do with my professor’s question, but the red horses of inebriation dragged my tongue and all that’s left of my lucidity away.

Jump-cut. A long one.

And there I was, several years later. Being lectured to by a commercial director about the types of plot, how everything should be driven by action. I knew that that couldn’t be gospel truth. Literature and cinema couldn’t be reduced to “types.” I’ve heard that before: those overcoming monsters, rebirth and the rags-to-riches bull? Maybe a writer or director ducking prop altogether is in itself a plot. Maybe going plot-less is a plot device. The field is wide open, things fall apart, and the center cannot hold. The commercial director went on and on. Clouds started forming in my coffee. I started wishing for those red horses to drag me away.

Another jump-cut. Shorter, though.

And there I was, watching Helen by two “desperate optimists” Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor in a darkened theater in Vienna, Austria. All 79 minutes of it, which seemed like 79 days.

A girl named Joy goes missing. Policemen come in search of the lost girl. They recruit students from Joy’s college to reconstruct the girl’s last known moments. Helen (Annie Townsend) gets to play Joy. Helen, who doesn’t know who her real parents are, starts to warm up to the idea of “becoming” Joy. She hangs out with the parents of the missing girl, starts an affair with the boyfriend. A story about absence, and occupying that absence told in a languid, almost dragging, sleepwalking manner. (Due most probably to my movie-watching punctuated with yawns and occasional blacking out; the reason being the theater had comfy seats and I had consumed copious amounts of Viennese beer.) I told the girl beside me that it could’ve worked better as a short film. She disagreed. She said the filmmakers wanted to show how long and torturous the search for one’s own place in the scheme of things is. Identity is never instantly established. The laboriousness of the protagonist’s investigations into who Joy was and who Helen is illustrates this. Condensing Helen into a short film would’ve abbreviated the search, wouldn’t have given the audience a lingering thought. Movies aren’t supposed to be paradises all the time.

Professor, I am ready to answer now.